Obama, 51, paid for his own expenses, including green fees, lodging and food, Earnest said. Taxpayers pay for presidents’ travel and that of his entourage of staff and Secret Service personnel.

So he covers the "cheap" stuff but we all pay for the $180,000/hour trip to and from Florida totaling over $2 million for the round trip to Florida and back.

There's a public course in Poolesville, MD he can fly Air Force Two to next trip and play there. or maybe just stop playing golf all together until you write a budget?

There is no disputing the Obama's are living the high life right now while people, for example, in the NC Air National Guard are getting furloughed this spring. They are the people who fly the C-130's to get heavy equipment in and out of Afghanistan and help fight wild fires in this country. They also airlift emergency supplies to other disaster victims.

But let's mess with people's lives while the first lady gets the opportunity to have millions spent, regardless of where the money is coming from, on her 50th birthday party. That is a horrible example to set and should crush any pleads of "shared sacrifice" coming from everyone in Washington.

You can't have it both ways. The only way, and I repeat, the only way that Obama could've stopped the sequester cuts is with an executive order. In case you haven't noticed, every exec. order he issues is already under extreme scrutiny. This time the ball was purely in Congress's court.

Yes, there are lots of people affected by the cuts. I can probably tell you a whole lot more heart-wrenching stories than about the NC Air National Guard, especially if you want to talk about families and children directly affected by the cuts.

If you're really that upset about the President golfing, which was actually something that was made popular by Eisenhower (cough Republican cough), then I have no idea what to tell you...

npv708 wrote:You can't have it both ways. The only way, and I repeat, the only way that Obama could've stopped the sequester cuts is with an executive order.

Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

Kind of like he is doing now after the realization that the fear mongering over the sequester isn't coming to fruition.

npv708 wrote:You can't have it both ways. The only way, and I repeat, the only way that Obama could've stopped the sequester cuts is with an executive order.

Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

Kind of like he is doing now after the realization that the fear mongering over the sequester isn't coming to fruition.

He was told that there was to be no compromise from McConnell and Boehner. What did you want him to do, dissolve Congress?

npv708 wrote:You can't have it both ways. The only way, and I repeat, the only way that Obama could've stopped the sequester cuts is with an executive order.

Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

Kind of like he is doing now after the realization that the fear mongering over the sequester isn't coming to fruition.

He was told that there was to be no compromise from McConnell and Boehner. What did you want him to do, dissolve Congress?

npv708 wrote:You can't have it both ways. The only way, and I repeat, the only way that Obama could've stopped the sequester cuts is with an executive order.

Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

Kind of like he is doing now after the realization that the fear mongering over the sequester isn't coming to fruition.

He was told that there was to be no compromise from McConnell and Boehner. What did you want him to do, dissolve Congress?

Well, he did buy all of those machine guns...

But he has to wait, now that those New Yorkers will remain so heavily caffeinated...

King Sid the Great 87 wrote:Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

1) "He could have attempted to lead"........ who, I wonder, from the GOP would follow?

2) It's a 2% cut in aggregate, but it's wildly disproportionate. For example, the defense cuts are actually on the order of 7%. If it were just 2% across the board, I doubt many would even notice.

columbia wrote:Did people complain about Bush's travel expenses?

Not so much the expenses as the volume.

Bush spent all or part of over 1,000 days on vacation, including one spell of five consecutive weeks away from Washington. That's roughly 2.7 years, or about one-third of his time in office. Put into context, that would mean I as a worker drone in an office would get about 80 days off a year.

Of course we all know that the president is never really 'off'. But 2.7 years? Woof.

npv708 wrote:You can't have it both ways. The only way, and I repeat, the only way that Obama could've stopped the sequester cuts is with an executive order.

Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

Kind of like he is doing now after the realization that the fear mongering over the sequester isn't coming to fruition.

He was told that there was to be no compromise from McConnell and Boehner. What did you want him to do, dissolve Congress?

By compromise, do you mean ignore the compromised additional revenue they agreed to at the beginning of the year and acquiesce to Obama's demand of another round of additional revenue this time as well?

This article goes into how the sequester devastates scientific research, something that effects me personally along with a few others on this board. Thank God I have secured funding for next year, but this will really hurt me and other future scientist in the upcoming years.

npv708 wrote:You can't have it both ways. The only way, and I repeat, the only way that Obama could've stopped the sequester cuts is with an executive order.

Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

Kind of like he is doing now after the realization that the fear mongering over the sequester isn't coming to fruition.

He was told that there was to be no compromise from McConnell and Boehner. What did you want him to do, dissolve Congress?

King Sid the Great 87 wrote:Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

1) "He could have attempted to lead"........ who, I wonder, from the GOP would follow?

2) It's a 2% cut in aggregate, but it's wildly disproportionate. For example, the defense cuts are actually on the order of 7%. If it were just 2% across the board, I doubt many would even notice.

The GOP is the side that made concessions from their original hard-lined position. They conceded on additional revenues over New Year's. In any good faithed negotiation, the next obvious step is for the other side to move towards the middle, not to demand more. The demand for more comes from Obama every time he speaks on the subject.

As far as the cuts, I work in defense, specifically for the prime on the F-35. If the rest of the defense world operates as Lockheed, trust me, 7% can be found easily. If it is as unbearable as some want to make it out to be, it's time for the Democrats to move on their position. Of course, when the head of the party is insistent that we don't have a spending problem, I guess you could suggest I **** in one hand and wish in the other.

King Sid the Great 87 wrote:Or he could have attempted to lead and convened both sides to attempt to find a reasonable solution prior to March 1 rather than continuing his perpetual campaign and spreading fear about how bad things were going to be from a 2% cut.

1) "He could have attempted to lead"........ who, I wonder, from the GOP would follow?

2) It's a 2% cut in aggregate, but it's wildly disproportionate. For example, the defense cuts are actually on the order of 7%. If it were just 2% across the board, I doubt many would even notice.

The GOP is the side that made concessions from their original hard-lined position. They conceded on additional revenues over New Year's. In any good faithed negotiation, the next obvious step is for the other side to move towards the middle, not to demand more. The demand for more comes from Obama every time he speaks on the subject.

As far as the cuts, I work in defense, specifically for the prime on the F-35. If the rest of the defense world operates as Lockheed, trust me, 7% can be found easily. If it is as unbearable as some want to make it out to be, it's time for the Democrats to move on their position. Of course, when the head of the party is insistent that we don't have a spending problem, I guess you could suggest I **** in one hand and wish in the other.

And Obama conceded on a campaign promise to raise taxes on the top 2% (singles earning over $200k, couples over $250k), instead raising marginal rates on singles over $400k and couples over $450k. And in terms of spending cuts or entitlement reform, it came out from the dinner last week that none of the GOPers in attendance were even aware that Obama has consistently been in favor of things like chained CPI - which is essentially a cut in Social Security benefits - despite the support being publicly viewable at whitehouse.gov. (Not that I think Senators and Representatives should spend their days trolling the President's website. The point is that this policy support is not a secret, and when some of those dinner guests were told that the President supported chained CPI, they scoffed as if the reporter telling them was making it up.) That's the most recent proposal to Boehner. The proposal is roughly 2:1 spending cuts-to-taxes. So if the GOP leaders don't even know the President's actual negotiating position.................. well, it seriously undercuts their credibility is I guess how I'll say it. As Upton Sinclair once said, "It is impossible to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on not understanding it."

I don't doubt that finding 7% should be easy. I'm on record here saying that if you spent six months fine-tooth-combing the whole federal budget and targeting specific programs for waste and bloat you could probably make an across the board immediate reduction in double digit percentages, and in Defense in particular you could probably double that amount. Extend that combing period to a year and I don't doubt that you could cut the budget near as in half. But that's not what the sequester is doing; it's driving a staple with a sledge hammer.

Besides, no one has any interest in doing that. Boehner makes a lot of noise about "spending problem gar!!!" and then goes on to the House floor and votes for the $3 billion alternative engine from GE for your F-35.... that the Pentagon did not even want!

I wouldn't go on to me about working for Lockheed....... I'm liable to say something mean.

I'm currently on a program with a lady making $110K/year (I do cost account stuff along with my engineering work) who spent two months preparing a 10 slide power point for a customer briefing. I spent two months in El Segundo in January '12 and watched Lockheed employees fly back and forth from Sunnyvale twice a week to rack up segments to maintain their flying status. To be fair, I've seen some efforts to reduce waste and control costs, and defense contracting is in a position to provide cheaper solutions in upcoming years simply by virtue of high paid employees (a significant portion of which are dead wood) retiring. However, inefficiencies exist. In my humble opinion, it is due to the structure where management most often matriculated from engineering. The concern for and understanding of cost and schedule isn't the primary concern in many of their minds.

All that said, entitlement spending is just as out of control. Both need major fixes. The best hope is a group of politicians who are more concerned about the long-term collective health of the country than they are with the individual short-term goal of pandering to constituents just to get re-elected.

A lot of the problems with The Big Three (SS, Medicare, Medicaid) are structural, in that they were created at a time when a much smaller number of people would be collecting the benefit. Shoot, when SS was enacted the minimum age for qualification was older than the average life expectancy in this country. Well, that's changed in the last couple decades. Now, instead of say <5% of the population even living long enough to collect the benefit at all, we have a majority of people collecting for ten or fifteen years (or more). They are not sustainable as they exist today. That has nothing to do with philosophy or whether or not I think a program 'should' exist...... it's empirical.

Defense procurement and entitlement reform are two areas that need massive overhauling in the budget process.

And KingSid, I wish I had known you were in El Segundo..... I drive past the LM office building on Aviation and El Segundo Blvd every night on my way home form work. My office is at the corner of Rosecrans and Aviation, across the street from Barnes & Noble, Trader Joe's and Fresh & Easy. That's only about a mile and a bit south of LM.

King Sid the Great 87 wrote:All that said, entitlement spending is just as out of control. Both need major fixes. The best hope is a group of politicians who are more concerned about the long-term collective health of the country than they are with the individual short-term goal of pandering to constituents just to get re-elected.

Another structural problem..... this can only be fixed if finding a solution is taken out of Congress' hands, like the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission in the 90s. Otherwise, you'd be asking Congressmen and Senators to voluntarily reduce their own power and influence. And, well.... let's just say that's a tall order.

From McCain's office, here below is what they say is a partial list of waste in the bill, which must pass by March 27 if the government is to remain open.

-- Provides $65 million for Pacific Coast salmon restoration for states including Nevada, a program that even President Obama mocked in his 2011 State of the Union address.

-- Directs the Department of Defense to overpay on contracts by an additional 5 percent (totaling $15 million) to contractors who are Native Hawaiian-owned companies.

-- Provides $154 million for Army, Navy and Air Force "alternative energy research" initiatives, the most recent notorious example of which was paying $26 per gallon for 450,000 gallons of alternative fuel.

-- Provides $15 million for the Civil Air Patrol above the amount authorized by the FY 2013 National Defense Authorization bill, paid for by cutting the Air Force’s Operations and Maintenance funding. This is just two days after the Air Force announced that it will reduce pilots’ flying hours by 18 percent because of cuts to its Operations and Maintenance budget.

-- Prohibits the retirement of the C-23 Sherpa aircraft, which the Army has asked to retire and which both the Army and Air Force no longer want or need. Last year, Congress granted the Army authority to give these aircraft to any state governor who wanted them and no one took them up on it, now we are preventing the Army from retiring them.

-- Directly contravenes the FY 2013 National Defense Authorization bill by providing $120 million for civilian infrastructure in Guam, which both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees explicitly prohibited until a sufficient cost analysis of the proposed movement of troops from Okinawa to Guam is completed.

-- Provides $14.7 million for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Watershed Rehabilitation Program, which the Administration has suggested eliminating for years.

-- Provides $10 million for the USDA High Energy Cost Grants program that go to subsidize electricity bills in Alaska and Hawaii.

-- Provides $5.9 million for USDA "Economic Impact Initiative" grants, which have become slush funds for local governments to do such things as rehab an exercise room and buy kitchen equipment for city government.

While I agree that those programs you cite are good examples of wasteful spending, they only account for $385,593,000 out of a nearly $4,000,000,000,000 budget. That is 0.00009639825 of the budget you are citing in favor of shutting down the whole operation. It would be like arguing that you can't make your mortgage payment because the cost of postage stamps went from 42 cents to 45 cents. Go ahead and say those programs need cut, but you don't need to "hope and pray" the government closes to accomplish that goal for any reason.

I hardly think those are the only wasteful items in the spending bill. And the government wastes billions of dollars on other ineffectual programs too, even if they aren't as overtly silly as the ones above.

While I agree that those programs you cite are good examples of wasteful spending, they only account for $385,593,000 out of a nearly $4,000,000,000,000 budget. That is 0.00009639825 of the budget you are citing in favor of shutting down the whole operation. It would be like arguing that you can't make your mortgage payment because the cost of postage stamps went from 42 cents to 45 cents. Go ahead and say those programs need cut, but you don't need to "hope and pray" the government closes to accomplish that goal for any reason.

I think the point is more that instead of shuttering tours of America's House and saving ~$4 million a year, they perhaps could have done some of the things on that list, a few of which are examples of programs the Administration itself has wanted to axe for some time.